Quote

John Cheever was the first writer I ever read who sort of had that similar sensation that, you know, life is nasty, miserable, brutish and short, but that occasionally, there's a certain river of light, a kind word, a telling gesture that sort of illuminates something.

— Ethan Canin

Sentiment: POSITIVE

←Previous Next→

✓Similar Perspectives

People who read poetry, for example, like the feel, the heft and the smell of a book.

— Simon Armitage

For me, however, that beloved, glowing little word happiness has become associated with everything I have felt since childhood upon hearing the sound of the word itself.

— Herman Hesse

Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.

— E. L. Doctorow

Words to me were magic. You could say a word and it could conjure up all kinds of images or feelings or a chilly sensation or whatever. It was amazing to me that words had this power.

— Amy Tan

Whatever brief delights it provides, mere strangeness in poetry and prose eventually leaves us cold, especially when we suspect the writer is stretching for effect to avoid the actual life before his eyes.

— Roger Rosenblatt

The sensitive artist knows that a bitter wind is blowing.

— Herbert Read

I thought Cheever was magnificent and that if I could write like him that would be the best I could do. And then I realized that what I really wanted to write had nothing to do with what he was doing.

— Harry Mathews

For me, when I 'discover' a story, there is a feeling of buoyancy and clarity, perhaps similar to early morning out on a prairie highway, when darkness lifts and reveals the outline of farmhouses and copses of trees in the distance.

— David Bergen

If you are feeling something, then Shakespeare felt it and wrote about it - and wrote about it so eloquently.

— Richard McCabe

✗Opposing Perspectives

When I start to write, words have become physical presence. It was to see if I could bring that private world to life that found its first expression through reading. I really dislike the romantic notion of the artist.

— John McGahern